We would like to begin by thanking all the commentators for taking the time to read and reflect on our dialogue and offer their own reactions; it can be particularly challenging to insert oneself as a third interlocutor within a dialogue between two people, but as Rizvi remarks at the end of her commentary, the important thing is to keep the conversation going and so what started as a dialogue between two people is now a dialogue between six. As a collection, though, the commentators provide a very diverse set of views and perspectives, which means that picking up common threads is not an easy option. Instead, we will try and respond to each of the commentators in turn, addressing what we see as their key points.
Barrett is our hardest respondent, simply because he does not seem to think the topic of our dialogue is even an issue; for him, asymmetry is a given which is underwritten by the second law of thermodynamics. What makes a response even harder is that he appears to be engaging as much with Olsen and Witmore as with Lucas and Hodder, if not more so. Nevertheless, in order not to flatly contradict our own preliminary remarks in this response and to keep Rizvi's spirit of conversation alive, we would ask Barrett to consider whether he regards asymmetry to be as simple as he seems to think. Does it just have one dimension, one meaning? We feel that our dialogue was precisely an attempt to draw out its complex dimensions.
At the end of his comment, Barrett judges that we failed in helping to clarify and evaluate the material conditions that make archaeological investigation possible in the contemporary world. We believe that precisely the opposite is the case. Barrett points to the importance of the second law of thermodynamics, according to which there is a gradual entropic dissipation of energy. The dissolution of the physical world is what archaeologists are trained to deal with, the collapse of buildings, their erosion and covering with soil, the decay of bodies and organic materials. In the contemporary industrial world sensitivities have emerged towards this erosion and loss of things. Archaeology and heritage provide the mechanisms that arrest the process, that respond to the asymmetry between our dependence on things (as heritage, identity, history) and their physical decay. Archaeology is the shoring up against the loss of things. We do not need to conserve the past. We do so because we have become entangled with the loss of things.
Mrozowski offers some very insightful comments, two of which we want to pick up. The first concerns his remark about our discussion on the Syrian refugees in terms of entanglement; there he raises an interesting tension between the binding power of wealth and the binding power of human attachment. The rich have more to lose by leaving if they cannot liquidize their assets, but they presumably also have more potential to liquidize than the poor; on the other hand, rich and poor alike may have other ties that bind which bear no relation to wealth – family, place, memories. Entanglements are certainly more complex than we portrayed them in this example and with this we very much agree – a point also made by Antczak in his commentary, especially regarding the density and articulation of entanglements. More contentious, though, is Mrozowski's general criticism of the way our dialogue perpetuated the dangerous game of binaries; it is arguably the case that the notation of HH, HT, etc. does sustain a certain form of dichotomous thinking. The problem, though, is not so much using binary thinking as letting it run away or be amplified to the extent that it starts to act like a gravitational force, pulling other concepts into its orbit so that one ends up with precisely the problematic divisions like past/present that Mrozowski is so rightly concerned about. This is something we tried to articulate in our conclusion to the dialogue. However, his concern seems to run deeper insofar as any binary works to drive a wedge in the world, creating two parties. But is this so? Binaries, to paraphrase Mary Douglas (Douglas and Isherwood Reference Douglas and Isherwood1996), can be mobilized to act as bridges or fences; where Mrozowski sees only fences, we see the potential for bridges too.
Rizvi raises a very different concern in her commentary, which largely centred upon the issue of care. She questions whether care is intrinsic to being as opposed to something which is nurtured – or not; she also questions whether care cannot be ascribed to things like hammers – and whether this is not just a bias of Western ontology. These are important points. Certainly care is not equally distributed. We care for some people more than others, just as we care for some other living beings and non-living things more than others. The term ‘tanglescape’ is helpful, pointing as it does to the spatial and temporal geography of different forms of entanglement, and thus adding to the overly conceptual construction of ‘tanglegrams’. The term also points to a mapping of the terrains of care, including the places and times where care is made disposable. We can ask in what spatio-temporal contexts entanglements lead to the abrogation of care. Thus the distribution of care is certainly something we learn and is caught up in political ideologies of life, welfare and so on, as Rizvi argues and as was raised in our dialogue, though perhaps not forcefully enough. But this does not necessarily undermine the notion that the propensity to care is somehow still basic to being – any being in fact, whose own being is a matter of concern.
More contentious is the question whether we extend this sense of care to inert matter. One supposes here that it is simply a matter of drawing a line – and we each have to do this for ourselves, albeit guided by our own cultural background; if we don't draw a line, is action at all possible? If we acknowledge the capacity for care in everything we perceive and encounter, what expansion of moral dilemmas would we be faced with, even in the most mundane of acts? None of this is to argue that the line cannot be moved; it is one thing to question where we draw it, another to question its inherent necessity.
Antczak's commentary is the longest and perhaps in many ways the one we might find the least disagreement with. His discussion of disentanglement as a complex, multifaceted process is certainly nothing to contest, and although he points out that we equate this process with irreversibility, nowhere do we argue that irreversibility is a simple return to the way things were, as he suggests. Here, we perhaps just needed to be more cautious about our terminology. His discussion of the different quantitative and qualitative aspects of entanglement, in terms of density and types of join, complements rather than contradicts anything in our dialogue. He is also right to point to quality, memory and affect in dependency relations between humans and things. How we respond historically to entanglements is at least partly the result of past experiences and backward-looking memories. For example, the histories of post-Soviet states are inflected by memories of the experience of the Soviet Union, and ruling groups in Turkey today are reassessing the Ottoman past and re-entangling with it in new ways.
The only real issue of contention that Antczak raises (p. 146) concerns our generalization that the greater the entanglement, the greater the irreversibility. There are two dimensions to this question. The first concerns historically localized entanglements; thus Antczak gives the example of accelerated disposability in our own times as our landfills overflow with discarded consumer goods. But as his own example unwittingly shows, the accumulating mass of discarded things creates new problems for us, which end up increasing our entanglement; even though we throw away last year's mobile phone, we still end up having to care for it, only now as garbage, not as a functioning phone. Any localized disentanglement can and usually does result in the emergence of a new entanglement to take its place.
The second dimension concerns the broader issue of whether humans as a species – our species history – follow the same path: is the record of human history a record of increasing entanglement and increasing irreversibility? While we ourselves may be in disagreement on this matter, we recognize that the debate can be informed by empirical archaeological enquiry. At a theoretical level one can argue that increased entanglements result in increases in the mobilization of power and resources so that ‘more can be done’, including the production of change, reversal and disentanglement. But from another angle, greater entanglement means that more is caught up, so that changing pathways becomes more difficult. This is the notion of path dependency. So much gets invested and caught up in a particular direction that change becomes difficult. Sorting out which of these hypotheses is correct is to some degree an empirical matter. Although, annoyingly, it may also be the case that both are true at the same time. Therein lies the inherent asymmetry of human–thing entanglement.
